“Science fiction, science fact, or just another religion?” A day will come when all three of those things are realized to be the same. I actually drew that shirt with my mind at a Phish show last Saturday.

Poor man’s markov chain: “Dissociated Press”, a toy built into the Emacs editor. Output a few characters, search for another point where the past few characters occurred, output a few more characters from there, lather, rinse, repeat. Or, a few words, if you prefer and if the source document is long enough to make it worthwhile.

I’ve reimplemented that several times as a stand-alone toy, when I was bored and looking for an excuse to play with another programming language. I haven’t seen a version implemented as a web proxy yet, but that doesn’t seem particularly hard to do… or someone could rattle off a version that runs in the browser.

Getting back to the subject for a moment: Remember that the Singularity originated as a Plot Device. It may have graduated to becoming philosophy, but remember that philosophy is what scientists do when they have absolutely no facts to work with — push the ideas around and see if anything falls out of them which might some day be testable.

Well we are on the verge of optical computing, cloud computing, and a hodge podge of other technologies on the horizon coming to fruition. AI is the one missing link in the chain that has kept the other so called sci-fi golden age ideas in check. Hell, there hasn’t been many real groundbreaking changes in science in ages, just further refinements. We are at a watershed in history, so aside from the religious implications, a world where there are 10 billion souls in many years from now who are stuck in a evolutionary stop gap as we round the drain of ever dwindling resources isn’t an appetizing alternate scenario.